The invitation to contribute to this Theories and Methodologies cluster was kindly. It suggested, in the gentlest way, that contributors reflect on “the experience of reading, writing, and listening to poetry in a pandemic, the importance of poetry to our physical and mental well-being, and the future of humanity glimpsed through this prism” (PMLA e-mail communication, 8 July 2020).
Implicit in the invitation are thus three things: a vision of poetry as the site of therapeutic effects, the recognition of an originary matrix (such as poetry) for literary studies, and a sense of the intimate and privileged access that we literary scholars have to that site and matrix. The consolations of poetry—multifarious and rewarding—can be secured through a return to our roots, as literary scholars doing what we do best: meditate on that most intensely literary of literary forms and, in the process, help us imagine a future for humanity.
The long period I study—the Middle Ages—yields many examples of the consolations, the therapeutic effects, and the future-granting promise of literature, in both poetry and prose.Footnote 1 One famous example, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, is even set in a pandemic, the fourteenth-century one caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which infested the world with bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague, reducing the world's population by as much as one third or more.Footnote 2
Scheherazade, the narrator of The Thousand and One Nights, did not fashion her words during a pandemic when she saved the lives of the young women in her land through story, but her resourcefulness still makes the point: in a life-threatening crisis, it's time to resort to the best words recited in the most compelling way.
Modern popular culture happily confirms the examples in premodern literature. In The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, an award-winning Australian–New Zealand feature film, a young boy leads a group of villagers on a quest to ward off the Black Death by tunneling through the world and time, leaving behind fourteenth-century rural England and arriving on the other side of the planet, in twentieth-century urban New Zealand, so that the group can plant a cross on a church steeple there and save their village from the plague through this symbolic, apotropaic gesture. As the haunting diegesis comes to a close, we see that the boy has in fact only been telling a story all along to a group of villagers huddled in a tunnel they've started to dig. But the village is still saved from the plague, though the storyteller dies.Footnote 3
The importance of turning to the best words, in the worst of times, is a repeating lesson in literature and culture.
Our current moment, most readers of PMLA will agree, is one of the worst of times—at least in the memory of those of us who are alive today in the United States. I need not rehearse the traumas of the present—2020's landscape of horror doesn't miraculously disappear with the inauguration of a new president and the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines—brutal reminders of which have appeared daily in the media, including the storming of the United States Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.
To those who feel this is the time to return to the best words literature can offer for consolation, therapy, and imagining the future, I feel sympathy, understanding, and comradeship.
But Only Poetry and Literature? The Work of Literary Scholars Today
However, in my corner of the woods, medieval studies, there is a tendency among certain loud voices in some disciplinary fields to say that literary scholars should only attend to poetry and literature, because that's our job description. Literature should be the sole object of our attention, and we should only do the work that is traditional to our discipline. We literary scholars, and especially those ensconced in English departments, ought to stay in our lane; in short, we ought to rediscipline ourselves.
This may seem risible to those familiar with decades of scholarship by literary scholars on a plethora of subjects from philosophy to soap opera, from political theory to digital gaming. In path-breaking scholarship, literary scholars have expanded their work far beyond what's traditionally considered literature. It may seem offensive, even absurd, to learn that interdisciplinary work is not for those trained as literary scholars.
But hostile declarations of this kind have become more common for those of us who work in nonmodern periods. This is remarkable, because medieval studies in fact entrenches interdisciplinarity as part of the long training and credentialing process; interdisciplinary and disciplinary training are inextricably intertwined in all academic fields of the nonmodern. But, of course, the calls for redisciplining medievalists from English departments in particular has a political context: they issue in the wake of my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.
Invention of Race is an unusual book, born of the recognition that for all their brilliance and variety, critical race theories of the last three quarters of a century have depicted race and racisms as emergent only in modernity (however defined).
By contrast, the book identifies and makes the case for a long history of race, extending back half a millennium before the early modern era, and critically treats a spectrum of archives from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries—including maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, histories and chronicles, saints’ lives, religious commentary, statutes and laws, political and social institutions, recreational literature, and communally created rumors and lies—to suggest that racial practices, racial thinking, racial law, racial institutions, and racial discourses arose as historical phenomena in the Latin West (Christendom/Europe) before the emergence of a vocabulary of race to name them for what they were.
The book argues that the selective positing of absolute and fundamental differences among humans, through strategic essentialisms devised to mark off human groups and populations differentially, in a prioritizing and hierarchizing mechanism of structural management, functioned in both sociocultural and biopolitical ways, in processes of race-making that conduced to the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.Footnote 4
One of the book's contributions to critical race studies, and to medieval studies, is then to show how religion—the magisterial discourse of the European Middle Ages, as science is the magisterial discourse of modern eras—functions as the matrix of race-making in the medieval period.
Written over twelve years but conceptualized over more than twenty, the 504-page monograph examines in seven chapters and an introduction the West's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani in a series of case studies not intended as exhaustive but calibrated to show how, among other critical factors, whiteness becomes central to the definition of the Christian European subject.
Since its appearance, Invention of Race has garnered four book awards, sold thousands of copies, and been reviewed a dozen times, in literary journals like Critical Inquiry and periodicals like The Times Literary Supplement, but also in journals of art history, religious studies, archeology, media and communications studies, and other disciplines.
More important, the book's appearance has driven new kinds of scholarship in premodern critical race studies, especially among junior scholars and medievalists of color, for whom the book furnishes analytic tools, theoretical scaffolding, and shelter to enable their work.
Despite all this—or because of all this?—rage has exploded in some disciplinary quarters about the impudence of a literary scholar (and a woman of color—not white, or European, or born in the United States), located in an English department, in undertaking wide-ranging transdisciplinary work on race that crosses over into other fields, ignoring borders and gatekeepers, and standing on turf that others claim as their own—in effect, unleashing a presumptuous, de facto undisciplining of literary studies.Footnote 5 One voice even sounded a doomsday knell, pointing to apocalyptic disciplinary stakes by asking, If literature scholars can write about history and art history, why would we even need historians or art historians in the future?Footnote 6
This is not the time or place to engage with those who have called for Invention of Race's erasure.Footnote 7
But this is the time and place to consider questions of the redisciplining and the undisciplining of English, to reflect on what our objects of study and what our processes should be, and why questions of redisciplining and undisciplining—which have become newly urgent again now, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, and resurgent white-nationalist extremism and terrorism—seem to coalesce around race.
Redisciplining or Undisciplining English? Our Processes and Objects of Attention
For starters, it's useful to think about the relations between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the scholarship performed today by literary scholars. If its book awards—for scholarship in history, religious studies, and non-field-specific work—are any indication, Invention of Race is viewed primarily as an interdisciplinary book. The book has won no awards in literary studies (though it does analyze literary texts).
But I would say that the interdisciplinary work (or the undisciplining) accomplished in Invention of Race across multiple archives in fact proceeds through disciplinarity itself—through forms of attention that recognizably emerge from a background in literary studies.
The book is the work of a literary scholar paying close, critical attention to a variety of artifacts in an intersubjective, dialectical dynamic of recovery with those artifacts, and governed by a commitment to ethical imperatives conditioned within literary studies—whether the character of the archive is documentary, like government statutes and canon law (31–33, 58–81); or visual, like world maps depicting monstrous races in Africa (33–36) or a sandstone statue of a Black African saint in a German cathedral (222–42); or institutional, like dynasties of foreign slaves ruling Egypt and Syria (138–50).
The recognition that disciplinarity might be an inescapable condition for a literary scholar laboring in archives that have no truck with the literary once more disarticulates the idea that disciplinary and interdisciplinary engagements necessarily exist in separable registers. For some literary scholars at least, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are bound in critically intimate relations.Footnote 8
This is not to say, of course, that the approaches, methods, and intellectual imperatives driving literary studies today are not diverse and multifarious. At all scales of analysis; at whatever distances, close or distant or in-between; at all speeds, slow or fast; through human or computational agency—the methods, approaches, and tools deployed by literary scholars today evince a formidable range.
But contingent calls by nonmodernists to rediscipline English are not interested in, and do not focus on, technologies of analysis; they zoom in on content. By whatever means we choose to analyze, we should keep in our lane and direct our energies to our rightful purview, which is literature. We should leave the “real world” and lived realities (as opposed to literature's created worlds) to others, under whose important, weighty jurisdiction it falls. We should also leave the representational worlds of nonliterary media to the “real” specialists.
But why? Part and parcel of such thinking of course is the implication that literary scholars whose work bears any whiff of a conceptual or theoretical taint, however slight, contaminate all they touch, and falsify reality. So conditioned to the created worlds of literature and theory are we that our analyses bend toward the construction of fabricated paradigms we then impose on the “real” worlds that more empiricist-minded colleagues study.Footnote 9 This is an old, old argument, from before the days of critical theory in the academy, and it has been treated in many fields, in many forms, when questions of ultimate knowledge and agency arise.
But what kind of conceptual or theoretical taint particularly invites objections? Among the objectionable today, critical conceptualization of premodern race produces the loudest warnings that scholars in English are colonizing all other disciplines. In this, we should not assume that objections to the critical study of race only issue from the right. Those who think of themselves as liberal-ish can also be invested in a preracial time in the West as historical reality, as facticity—perhaps because a preracial time allows for the projection of a postracial time, a time that, as we saw, was prematurely prognosticated for the Obama era? If race has been with us so long, and so much, we won't get to a point where we can stop thinking about it.
The Invisibility of Race, Here, There, Everywhere; or, Undisciplining English Now
By stark contrast to nonmodernists who want a redisciplining of English, scholars of color who work on race in modern periods have called for an undisciplining of English.
A recent special issue of Victorian Studies is a signal example. The issue's three editors, Ranjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, all women scholars of color, call for a complete rethinking of Victorian literature, an overhaul that would engage centrally with race and make visible all that has been hitherto invisible in Victorian literature and its scholarship, and within Victorian studies itself: “we want to illuminate how race and racial difference do in fact subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field” (Chatterjee et al.).Footnote 10
Citing Christina Sharpe's powerful call—“We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching”—the editors suggest the simplest of first steps: “recognizing characters in a Victorian novel not as race-less, but as white . . . or calling racist slurs, images, and figures of speech that appear in these novels what they are: racist” (Chatterjee et al.).Footnote 11
The editors understand, however, that not undertaking scholarship “in a sanitizing way” is only a beginning: “‘Undisciplining’ is not quick or easy, nor is it work that is necessarily ever completed”; it is work, moreover, that will involve “our own ongoing challenges to undiscipline ourselves as well as the field.”
The three editors call for change at a moment when other literary scholars of color working in modern periods are also taking up the challenge of undisciplining their fields and creating scholarly collectives for new work on race. Often identified by their hashtags on Twitter, the collectives treat periods that range from the early modern (#ShakeRace, in Shakespeare studies) to the high modern (#BIPOC18, in eighteenth-century studies, and the Bigger 6 Collective, in Romanticism). #RaceB4Race—a collective that includes some members of the Medievalists of Color and many members of #ShakeRace—bridges the gap between the medieval and the early modern periods.Footnote 12
Undisciplining, in the context of these endeavors, is aimed in the first place at ending the invisibility of race in English literature, and suppositions of racelessness both in the literature and in its field of study. But that isn't all.
Implicit in the Victorianists’ demand for undisciplining is also a recognition that the objects of attention and the archives should widen far beyond literature, because the history of race and racism, to quote Sharpe's reworking of William Faulkner, remains a “past that is not past” (9). Indeed, “Eurocentricity and its attendant whiteness” (Chatterjee et al.) has a history that stretches back for over a millennium, and the many recursions of the past in the present evince the plurality of time in our present moment.Footnote 13 In a past that is not past, race and racisms inhabit all archives, not just the literary ones.
We should thus acknowledge, at this time, that a commitment to antiracism in the academy requires all modes of work—disciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary—in a multitude of archives, literary and nonliterary, without circumscription, and without apology, in order to reach that “undisciplined third space where one can think strange thoughts and even make mistakes” (Squier 65) in the unfinished and seemingly interminable work on race, so as to bend the arc of the moral universe, inch by inch, incrementally, toward racial equity and justice.Footnote 14
For those who would turn to poetry in this time of pandemic, which is also the time of an epidemic of racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and white-terrorist predation, there is a ground where undisciplining English can meet disciplinary interests: the ground of political poetry, graced by the courageous, luminous, and powerful work of such poets as Aimé Césaire, Carolyn Forché, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, A. Van Jordan, Claudia Rankine, and Khaled Mattawa, among many, many others. Here is where a return to poetry—in writing, reading, or listening—can be a disciplinary practice that also works to undiscipline English.Footnote 15
The choices that we make in our current moment—a time of unprecedented social, economic, and political upheaval, abutting a backdrop of epidemiological disaster and environmental devastation—will determine what kind of university and educational landscape we will have in the years to come. Chatterjee, Christoff, and Wong say it best:
Arundhati Roy has described the pandemic-stricken present as a “portal” that we can walk through “dragging the carcasses of our . . . data banks and dead ideas” or leaving them behind. We do not want to lug into the landscape before us “dead ideas” about disciplinarity and division—between fields, between aesthetics and politics, between history and the present. (Chatterjee et al.)
Whether we are reading, writing, or listening to poetry—or not—those are the stakes before us as we look toward a postpandemic future.
